“But what if I wanted to leave the civil service and I don’t have a degree?" is a question that Sir Bob Kerslake must answer. Photograph: Teri Pengilley

A few weeks ago, my stepdaughter arrived home from her sixth form college wanting to talk about the opportunity she had to apply for the new civil service apprenticeship scheme.

She is a bright, articulate and confident young woman with a huge love for Europe and European politics, who speaks two other European languages, is predicted high A-level grades and wants to go to a good university. For the past two years, she has said she wants to work in the civil service, preferably in Brussels, if not in England – she is politically engaged, idealistic and she cares. Just the sort of young person I imagine the civil service would want to engage, and the sort of person they might like to attract to their apprenticeship scheme.

So why – after a few weeks of thinking about it, talking to others and reading what is written about the scheme online – has she decided, with my full support (not that my views either way would have made a difference), not to apply? And why am I pleased about her decision?

She concluded that the apprenticeship wouldn't give her what university would – namely a passport, she hopes, to a wide open future of possibility and opportunity. Once she got over the excitement of earning money rather than accumulating debt at university, she started thinking about where she would actually be in three or four years' time compared with her peers. Frankly, she didn't believe the narrative that her apprenticeship would be as good as having been to university. The case just wasn't compelling enough.

My stepdaughter has always been educated in the state system and she concluded that the scheme was, "to get people like her not from private schools into the civil service". She likes that idea. She is vehemently against private education and elite universities, but she felt that going through the apprenticeship scheme would mean she would always be a second-class citizen in the civil service.

She may be right. She may be wrong. In four years' time and beyond, the top civil servants, public sector officials and people in private business might have gone through the civil service apprenticeship and it may have been proven to be a wonderful, exciting and innovative alternative to a university degree.

I hope that it is. But my stepdaughter isn't willing to be a guinea pig for the scheme and pass up an opportunity to go to university now. "But what if I wanted to leave the civil service, or it's abolished or outsourced and I don't have a degree," she asked. I didn't have an answer. While it's her life and was always her decision, I am glad she's made that choice – and I feel sure the civil service here or in Europe will see her one day anyway.